Editorial: Budget brings good and bad news

The $29 billion budget passed by the state General Assembly delivers some good news and some bad news to area schools.

But mostly it delivers the same uncertainty that always comes from a budget built by politicians rolling the dice in back rooms.

The budget process in Pennsylvania is misguided at its very core, creating hardship for local schools which gets passed on as hardship to local taxpayers. The lack of a fair funding formula in Pennsylvania means that schools cannot predict the state support that will be coming their way. The lack of a formula also means that school funding is based on the whims of legislators instead of on the basic educational needs of students.

A system based on a formula provides stability and predictability in school funding. Instead, the current system forces school districts to guess at the level of funding they will get from the state. The local guessing game has to be resolved by mid-June for a fiscal year that starts July 1. But the state, which plays by its own rules, typically waits until the last few days of the fiscal year to craft its budget. Schools are in the dark as to how much they’re getting, thus finalizing budgets with guess-timates on the state share.

In the budget put together last week by legislators, the basic subsidies to local schools remained flat. But increases were included in the new “Ready to Learn” block grant program, money from which can only be used for specific purposes, including kindergarten or implementing technology in the classroom.

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Gov. Tom Corbett and many legislators use the “new” grants in education to claim increased state funding for schools. But Pennsylvania remains far below the national average in percentage of state funding for schools, according to the Education Law Center. Only nine states contribute a lower percentage of state funding to schools than Pennsylvania, that February 2013 report showed.

Corbett advocated earlier this year for a fair funding formula, an ironic proposal since a formula that was in place stopped being used in the first budget after Corbett took office. State Rep. Todd Stephens of Montgomery County also proposed legislation this year for “equalization” in school funding as an aid to poorer districts.

Instead of achieving these efforts at fair funding, however, the governor and Republican legislators are patting themselves on the back for giving grants to districts.

The failure to stabilize funding with an equitable system has increased the local burden in districts that can least afford it. A study by the Public Citizens for Children and Youth found that $2.5 million was lost in Norristown in the past three years due to the lack of a fair funding formula, and Pottstown lost $1.5 million. The cumulative effect is that Pottstown taxpayers would have been off the hook for $5 million this year — and that’s just one district example. Poorer schools throughout Pennsylvania reflect the same disparity.

The budget written last week was another roll of the dice for local school funding, throwing out some grant money while failing to address the larger issues of stable funding, educational equity or skyrocketing pension liabilities.